Electric Scooters And Collateral Ecosystems: Bird Hunters

Bird and Lime scooters sit parked in front of a building on April 17, 2018 in San Francisco, California. Three weeks after three companies started placing electric scooters on the streets for rental, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued cease-and-desist notice to electric scooter rental companies Bird, LimeBike and Spin. The notice comes as the San Francisco board of supervisors considers a proposed ordinance to regulate the scooters to keep people from riding them on sidewalks, parking them in the middle of sidewalks and requiring riders to wear helmets and have a drivers license. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The ideas put forward by Bird, also used by other competitors such as Lime (which manages both scooters and bicycles), seek to solve the question of the nightly collection of scooters for recharging and checking. Both companies pay people to become Chargers (in the case of Bird) or Juicers (in Lime’s) to use their own vehicles at night to locate scooters using the app, take them home, charge their batteries and deliver them the next morning to designated spaces. This freelance approach can be combined with company employees using vans to also collect scooters (around 40 in the case of Lime).

We now find ourselves with a growing social phenomenon among young people, dubbed “bird hunters”, in search of additional income. As part of a “game” that has been compared to Pokemon Go, the scooters are given a value based on their level of charge and location, and depending on the number located and charged, it’s apparently possible to earn up to $600 in one night, in exchange for a fairly low amount of electricity and, above all, the time and effort involved.

Chargers and juicers are paid via direct deposit in their bank accounts, and also compete against each other to find the highest-rated scooters, risking ambushes when they try to pick up vehicles that have been left as lures in out-of-the-way areas, or when they come up against criminals who steal the vehicles of break them up to sell the parts. Messages on social networks warn bird hunters against going into certain neighborhoods and to carry defensive tasers or mace, or working in groups to protect themselves and then sharing profits.

This is just another example of the sharing economy based on taking advantage of idle cycles: people willing to invest time and some effort, as well as using their vehicles and a small amount of electricity, to make some extra cash. We may well see companies lower their rates as they seek to adjust offer and demand, but even so, many chargers affirm that, within reasonable limits and even if the incentives were reduced by half, the activity is still worthwhile, not just financially, but from a gaming and even a civic perspective.

The viability of electric dockless scooters has been questioned and compared to the excesses of dockless bicycle companies in China, while others have ridiculed their use alluding to their toy-like nature; but the fact is that more and more people are using them in more and more cities, while companies like Bird and Lime continue to attract investment in consecutive financing rounds. At the same time, creating jobs by using the self-employed to charge them could help mitigate some of the problems already associated with them.

The key, at this point, is the amount of daily use required to make a profit when the rate is $1 per trip plus 15 cents a minute, and you also have to pay people to collect them and charge them overnight, along with losses from theft and maintenance. But as other sectors and companies have often shown, turning a profit can often be second to growth.

Teaching Innovation at IE Business School since 1990, and now, hacking education as Senior Advisor for Digital Transformation at IE University. BSc (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), MBA (Instituto de Empresa) and Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (UCLA).